The extent to which a severe trauma from youth can be projected into an exceptional work of art is shown by the case of an Italian Baroque painter. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 - 1653).
A talented nineteen-year-old girl was taught painting skills by a Roman artist Augustine Tasi. Using the authority of a respected master, he blackmailed his young protégé and satisfied his unbridled lust with sexual assaults. “...He threw me on the bed, pushed me by holding my breast, put his knee between my thighs so that I could not close them. He lifted my clothes and put a handkerchief over my mouth to prevent me from screaming. I scratched his face, pulled his hair, and before he could penetrate me again, I grabbed his penis so that I cut off a piece of his skin.” This quote, in which the innocent victim cruelly tries to free herself from her attacker, is part of the transcript from the trial of Artemisia Gentileschi and Agostino Tassi held in Rome in 1612. The trial lasted seven months. Since there was doubt about the credibility of the victim's testimony, Artemisia was subjected to cruel torture with metal chains around her fingers, in order to force her to tell the truth. For the same purpose, she was subjected to gynecological examinations and humiliating interrogations by investigators. At the trial, she told Tasi: “I wish I had killed you with a knife because you have dishonored me”. Tasi did not say anything in his defense. Although he was accused of murdering his wife, which he did not deny, he was sentenced to three years of exile from Rome for this case. But the reputation he enjoyed at that time in the Eternal City, and especially the favor Pope Innocent X allowed him to avoid the punishment he had been given. When it seemed that the young artist's life would be ruined, that the trauma and scandal that had occupied the Romans for some time would discourage the injured and humiliated young woman, life circumstances, especially thanks to Artemisia's father, Oration, also a painter, radically changed. She married a Florentine artist Pierantonia StiatesiaThey lived in Rome for a while. After moving to Florence, her talent as a painter came to full expression, thanks to which she achieved a successful career and gained a great reputation in society.
She was accepted into the Florentine Academy of Arts, becoming the first female member of this famous artistic institution. She was respected by a powerful family. Medici, worked for the Spanish King Philip IV, for English King Charles I Stuart, communicated with Galileo Galilei and many notables of the time.
The life path and fate of this artist are so inspiring that the feature film “Artemisia” was made in 1997. What is now called “rape trauma syndrome” is caused, according to the profession, by a whole series of symptoms and consequences. Such consequences of post-traumatic stress disorder bring about radical changes. Among other things, victims often want to give up their previous profession by changing jobs, trying to separate themselves as much as possible from the traumatic experience they experienced. Interestingly, the traumatic experience of the Italian Baroque painter transformed, or rather, positively reflected on the creative potential of her deeply wounded being. Artemisia’s love for art could have been destroyed forever by the negative experience she had with a violent teacher. The accumulated negativity turned into hatred that sublimated into an impressive creative drive. In her tragic case, there was no aversion to the art of painting. The need for painting and creative expression had a kind of therapeutic effect. An expression of hatred towards the one who deeply hurt her, who dishonored her and, along with humiliation, caused her eternal pain, the raped artist transposed this traumatic experience by painting the Old Testament theme of the beautiful Hebrew heroine Judith, who beheaded the enemy of her Jewish people, the Assyrian military leader Holofernes, one night after an act of love, with his sword. The dark harmony of eros and death from a painful sexual experience was realized in a painting composition of impressive expressiveness. It is believed that this biblical theme, popular in the Renaissance and Baroque, served Artemisia Gentileschi to project herself into the figure of Judith, venting her hatred in a bloody act of revenge against the rapist, the ruthless Assyrian military leader in whom she symbolically saw and onto whom she projected the figure of Tassi. How much she was inclined to this theme and how deeply she experienced it, carrying the feeling of this fierce hatred, is evidenced by the fact that the Baroque master painted five paintings of this motif, of which the most impressive are the two versions depicting the brutal beheading of Holofernes. All the repulsion and contempt for Tassi in these works resulted in the painterly compensation of the biblical motif for all the mental and physical pain, for all the torture that permanently branded the young raped artist from within. In addition to the repulsion of the depicted motif, which is characterized, as someone noted, by “savage realism”, Artemisia’s composition radiates the beauty of cruelty that emerges from the Baroque artist’s manner of painting, which is visible in the expression of Judith’s half-lit face, in the refined color of the clothes, in the rich folds of the fabrics in chiaroscuro effects and dynamics of the movement of the protagonists of the scene against the dark opaque background of Holofernes's soldier's chamber. Although it is based on Caravaggio The composition of the same name and the dramatic charge of Artemisia's “Judith and Holofernes” introduces a novelty in terms of the iconographic concept of the plot. The maid is no longer just Judith's passive companion who is ready to put the severed head in her bag, but is an active accomplice in the vengeful act of decapitation. The actualization of the life and work of Artemisia Gentileschi, “the greatest painter among the Caravaggios” as she was qualified by the profession, in a broader social context contributes to the affirmation of that part of the population that sees the Italian artist as an icon of feminism and “a symbol of the fight against the oppression of women”. Outside of such frameworks of social activist engagement, Artemisia Gentileschi remains a strong creative individual whose darkness of personal trauma has permanently illuminated the richness of her exceptional artistic gift.
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